The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path explores the counter-intuitive insight that Sadness and joy are not opposites - and that human capacities often suppressed or rejected can, instead, be gateways to deep joy, creativity, and liberation. - Sharon Salzberg,.
There we find open space, true love of life, and, perhaps most redeeming, one another.
Jay Michaelson guides us, instead of denying, avoiding, explaining away or resisting sadness, to go right into the heart of it. - Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence The Gate of Tears is a beautifully written, transformative book.
Our inner world will never seem the same.
Here we have an antidote to mindless feel-good ideology, and gentle instructions in attending to the fullness of our experience so we see the value in the downs, not just the ups.
Advance Praise Jay Michaelson\'s incisive and exquisitely profound insights into our human condition come in full force in The Gate of Tears.
The Gate of Tears is about how the embrace of that experience ennobles, empowers, and liberates us.
All of us, if we are to be fully human, experience pain.
With his usual blend of erudition and accessibility, Michaelson weaves together Hasidic tales and Dharma teachings, Leonard Cohen and Langston Hughes.
The Gate of Tears is not a New Age book with easy answers; it is infused with a contemporary sensibility, skepticism, and humor.
Yet he is also a longtime teacher of insight meditation in Western Buddhist and secular mindfulness contexts, who has sat many months-long silent meditation retreats. in Jewish Thought, and has taught Jewish mysticism in and outside the academic world.
Michaelson is a rabbi, and holds a Ph.
D.
The Gate of Tears draws on Jay Michaelson\'s fifteen years as a student, and now a teacher, of Buddhist and Jewish contemplative paths.
As the contemporary Buddhist teacher Lama Surya Das says in his foreword to the book, the only thing that prevents happiness is searching for it.
If anything, it is a self-helpless book, discovering a happiness deeper than transitory joys that emerges precisely when the resistance to Sadness is released.
Written over a ten year period, and completed in the mourning period after the death of the author\'s mother, The Gate of Tears is not a self-help book.
They are reflections on the Path of surrender, alchemy, and the sacred.
Its eighty-two short, poetic, sometimes epigrammatic chapters draw on contemplative traditions, art, even pop songs.
The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path explores the counter-intuitive insight that Sadness and joy are not opposites - and that human capacities often suppressed or rejected can, instead, be gateways to deep joy, creativity, and liberation
